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Justin C. Kasper |
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Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research |
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Welcome to my home page. I am a research scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. You can learn more about me by clicking here. —————————————————————————— Recent News: 16 May 2007 (older news here) NASA, NSF, MIT, and LANL press release on our results studying the variation of helium in the solar wind. Click here for a preprint of the paper. MIT: Team discovers 'throttle' for solar wind (link) NASA: Helium May Set Minimum Speed Limit for Solar Wind (link) Los Alamos: Solar Wind Slowed by Helium, Researchers Suggest (link) —————————————————————————— I study the physics of energy flow in magnetized plasmas under non-equilibrium astrophysical settings. I work on environments within our heliosphere, including the solar corona, the solar wind, and the planets, and also on more distant astrophysical environments. My work concerns the energy flow between plasmas and magnetic fields and includes: · Magnetic reconnection– the sudden conversion of magnetic energy into bulk motion · Turbulence and dissipation—the conversion of large-scale motion into fluctuations that heat plasmas · Shocks– sharp discontinuities that convert flow into thermal energy, particle acceleration, and emission · Instabilities– the coupling between kinetic aspects of particle distributions and electromagnetic fluctuations · Bulk acceleration—the conversion of pressure gradients into the bulk acceleration of plasma, such as the origin of the solar wind in the corona. I am also working on several astrophysics projects outside our solar system, including searches for prompt radio emission from Gamma Ray Bursts. You can lean more about my research interests here, and look at my publications and talks here. I maintain a database of interplanetary shocks here. Half of my experimental work involves designing hardware for spaceflight. Robotic spacecraft that can operate for decades in deep space are the ultimate Rube Goldberg devices. I helped build and calibrate the Faraday Cup for the Triana spacecraft. I analyze the Faraday Cup data from the Solar Wind Experiment on the Wind spacecraft and distribute the Wind data to the NSSDC. I am the instrument scientist for the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER), which is scheduled to fly to the moon in 2008. I am also very interested in the possibility of conducting very low frequency imaging measurements from space. This is necessary for frequencies below 10 MHz because the ionosphere becomes opaque at longer wavelengths. I am involved with plans to build a constellation of spacecraft with radio antennas, and I am working on designs for radio telescopes that could be placed on the surface of the moon. We maintain a web page for the Solar Imaging Radio Array (SIRA) here. I was recently interviewed by Nature about building a radio telescope on the moon, and you can read the conversation here. I am also involved in several ground-based experiments in low-frequency radio astronomy. I have worked with observations from existing radio telescopes such as the Very Large Array (VLA). My most exciting ground based project is a large-scale radio telescope that we are building in the Western Australian outback in an area called Mileura Station. The Mileura Wide-Field Array Low Frequency Demonstrator (MWA-LFD) is a large distributed imaging interferometric radio telescope with solar and astrophysical science objectives. MWA was selected by the NSF in 2006 and we expect to begin construction of the full array in late 2007. I am a member of the Science Council, which sets scientific priorities and practices for the array. I am also part of the team designing the digital signal flow and calibration scheme, and I am a member of the Solar, Heliospheric, and Ionospheric (SHI) and Transient science teams. For more information on MWA consult my MWA web page for additional information and links to other MWA sites.
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